Why meet a member when you can meet a team? Here are the folks from MaineGeneral Medical Center. They are all ACDIS members and all six ladies hold the Certified Clinical Documentation Specialist (CCDS) credential. MaineGeneral Medical Center has campuses in Augusta and Waterville.Read More »
Recovery Auditors (previously called Recovery Audit Contractors [RAC]) saved Medicare nearly $500 million in Fiscal year (FY) 2011, according to...Read More »
"Don’t let the relative quiet fool you,” says James S. Kennedy, MD, CCS, CDIP, president of CDI MD-Physician Champions in Smyrna, Tenn., “there are big changes in this year’s IPPS final rule, changes that represent a paradigm shift in the way CDI programs work.”Read More »
More than 500 organizations have signed on to participate in CMS’ “Bundled Payments for Care Improvement” initiative, to test whether grouping payments by episode of care can help improve quality and lower costs, according to a CMS release.Read More »
by Trey La Charité, MD
I realized, painfully, early in my career as a physician advisor for CDI that I needed to learn a lot more about coding and the process of translating physicians’ written words into ICD codes. I also needed a more secure footing to successfully appeal the ever...Read More »
Q: We recently had a case where the patient was admitted from the ED with pneumonia but the attending hospitalist diagnosed acute bronchitis because the chest x-ray did not show infiltrates or any of the verbiage indicating possible pneumonia.
by James P. Fee, MD, CCDS, and Garry L. Huff, MD, CCS, CCDS
Certainly, the alphabetical and tabular index of the ICD-9-CM codebook assume the “postoperative” relationship as causal, but a CDI specialist should investigate this further within the specific clinical context.Read More »
